Can someone explain (if its possible) how to swap the current combat music back to the combat music that was used in the earlier expansions (shortly after release). I like all of the music...but I just wanted to get the feel of the more classic EQ2 environment (sounds corny I know). I tried cutting the combat music and pasting it in a custom directory and then renaming the older files as some of the newer combat files were named and pasting them back in the combat music folder inside the EQ2 directory. When I ran the game...it updated about 80mb before it would let me play. I was almost certain that it was overwriting what I had just done with the combat music...I was right. It just updated the combat music replacing all the music back to default. Boohoo! Any ideas on how to get around this? I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

You can replace any of the music files (without the patcher overwriting them on updating) by doing the following:

In the EQ2 install directory (same directory that has the 'music', 'logs', etc. folders) create a directory named 'custom_music' (not sure if that is case-sensitive or not but lowercase works for sure).

In that 'custom_music' folder you can put any mp3 files you wish to use but you must match the directory name/path and filename of the file(s) you wish to replace exactly (including any upper/lower case letters) as it is in the 'music' folder.

So, for example, if you wanted to replace the 'Loading.mp3' file (the music that plays on the load screen) which is in:

/music/Loading.mp3

You would make a file in your custom_music folder at:

/custom_music/Loading.mp3

or if you want to replace the Thurgadin zone music which is located at:

/music/zones/_exp07/Thurgadin/THURGADIN_CITY_V2.mp3

you would place a corresponding file at:

/custom_music/zones/_exp07/Thurgadin/THURGADIN_CITY_V2.mp3

You can follow those steps to replace any/all of the music in the game with your own. It seems, from my limited use of this, that any valid MP3 file will work as long as the path/filename are correct.
Keep in mind that the game has to load these files so try to avoid really big MP3 files (which shouldn't be a problem if you're using the older SOE files).